10 points

Woke isn’t being progressive. It’s being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.

In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:

  • There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
  • The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
  • There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
  • If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, they’ll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that’s clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
  • Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
  • The IP’s understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
  • Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the “woke” elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
  • Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said “woke” content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
  • Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the “professional” critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
  • The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
  • You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only don’t consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
  • Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn’t like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
  • Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
  • At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.

I think there’s a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn’t become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.

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1 point

Great comment, you’ve nailed it.

I think there’s a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse

Funny enough even within the Star Wars universe there are good and bad things. Mandalorian and Rogue One? Pretty great. Episode 7+ and Acolyte? Pretty shit. You’ll notice though that the more forced the progressivism is in a given piece of content, the more it sucks. In other words: bad writing doesn’t just fuck the story up, it bakes in messaging that doesn’t even make sense contextually.

Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the author’s obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience. Why would we excuse it from progressives?

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10 points

I disagree with your premise that that “forced progressivism” messes things up. Andor, for example, is the most progressive Star Wars media ever, and it’s amazing for it. (It’s literally about a leftist, or at least leftist coded, rebellion against Fascists, and wears it proudly.) The reason is because the people making it were allowed to be creative and were passionate about what they were making.

Its the lack of creative freedom and passion that kills things. Most things with a lot of money put into them are directed by suits, not creatives. They don’t want to take risks, so they just follow trends and formulas. This leads to the media not having anything to actually say, and just a veneer of trying to appeal to certain people, without actually doing anything with it.

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2 points

I generally agree with you, with some caveats.

I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. That’s part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.

The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.

There’s also the concept of nuance that’s sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way that’s basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesn’t already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesn’t just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.

The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios don’t interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. There’s no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.

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3 points

I haven’t seen Andor so I can’t comment, but I’ll take the plunge on your advice.

I think corporate “progressivism” is certainly one of the culprits, but sometimes it’s the creatives themselves who ruin things. Some creatives have even intentionally uprooted an IP like The Witcher’s show, and Rings of Power. Sometimes progressive ideals are merely a shield against criticism, other times it’s a creators’ own ideals that made them ruin things, and sometimes it’s just rainbow capitalism. It’s not a simple issue to talk about really.

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6 points

Anyone who has ever read the Sword of Truth series and encountered the author’s obsession with hating socialism has seen what happens when right-wing folk do it: it ruins the experience.

And unions. Really drove that home when Richard was in the Old World.

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4 points

Oh you have definitely read it. I come from a family of union men, and am myself a union executive. Reading that stuff felt surreal lol.

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7 points

To be fair I’m sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.

I don’t think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.

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3 points

The one character that felt shoehorned in to me was Idris Elba as Roland in The Gunslinger. Why?! Handsome, buff, young and black are not adjectives anyone has ever used to describe Roland Deschain. LOL, King might as well come out and say he ripped the description off a 40-something Clint Eastwood.

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39 points

Woke isn’t being progressive. It’s being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior

I fucking hate that the idea of being woke was poisoned and turned into this when it very much is not and never was.

Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.

I think most of what you wrote isn’t even true to be honest, it’s a well strung together list of annoying tropes which doesn’t even happen nearly as much or widely as some would suggest. It’s a neat little “here’s a bad way of caring” package but it ain’t the truth.

I appreciate the effort you went through to write the post and I understand your viewpoint. At the same time, this is a great example of how the term “woke” has been co-opted into meaning something it never really did. Being awake to the injustices present in our lives isn’t a bad thing. Turning woke into a slur to wrongly characterize and misdirect away from its true original intent has been an effective, and gross, way to get people to automatically reject real critique.

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1 point

Woke is acknowledging the systemic racism playing out daily in the United States of America.

If only. But like all of your societal problems, it’s being exported to all kinds of places, often where it has little relevance, but where it can be used for political gain by soulless individuals.

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16 points

You’re both right, but it’s far too late to take the word back, no point in going on about the origins.

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5 points

No it isn’t.

I am woke, and that is a good thing, and anyone complaining about that is an idiot.

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10 points

I get what you’re saying, but…

For example, they’ll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that’s clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.

While I don’t know about 1200s Scotland specifically, the notion that black people didn’t exist in old Europe is a false narrative by racists who seem to believe immigration was invented around the 1700s (like, I’ve seen them claim black people don’t fit into Ancient Greece, which is definitely wrong.)

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-1 points

I mean immigration existed, but it wasn’t nearly as common as today. A lot of these IPs just plop a minority in an area where their presence would turn heads, have everyone act super casual about it because they are too lazy for a backstory, and then call everyone a bigot who points out this is sort of silly. On the flip side, there are people who will call creators bigots for not including minorities in some quasi historical setting, even if their presence was rare.

Like pretend someone was making a movie in present day central Africa. Everyone is central African. Except one dude who is pure blooded Navajo. No explanation is ever given, and the only people who seem to even notice his race is the villain.

While it’s perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, it’s not really that likely. Audiences would want an explanation, and would consider it unrealistic if absolutely nobody commented on it except some over the top villain.

There’s also an aspect of gaslighting going on here. Over the past decade historians have made a lot of claims about racial compositions of historical groups that were later exposed to be largely inaccurate. While historical inaccuracies are always a thing, it’s pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.

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0 points

While it’s perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, it’s not really that likely.

What part about literally any story about heroes and adventures is “really that likely”? Every story ever told is told because they’re unique and thrilling and unusual. Pretending like your problem with the “wrong” races mixing in fiction is because it’s “unlikely” belies the fact that everything in these stories is unlikely. Why aren’t you complaining about main characters that are shockingly born from the lost line of monarchs, the last heir able to save the kingdom? Or having a mysterious, ancient weapon literally fall into their hands? Or any other number of preposterously unlikely things that are what make these stories worth telling? You don’t complain about them because they don’t bother you. But a black person in Scotland? THAT’S where you draw the line? Come the fuck on.

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18 points
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Your last bit is the only part that matters. Good content is good. There’s so much well written progressive “woke” stuff that does well, but it’s easy to point at a shitty flop and say it failed because it’s “woke” rather than doing the hard work and actually analyzing why it’s bad. “Woke” content isn’t an issue in media. It’s that we’re getting so much bad and lazy writing in AAA games (and other big media). They aren’t allowed to be creative, so it ends up being garbage.

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15 points
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Add on top of that that the games industry has laid off TENS OF THOUSANDS of devs in the last three or four years.

I know a lot of talented people who are no longer working as devs, or who have been job searching for months.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the studios still producing games have narrowed their scopes, they just dump more work on the survivors.

And “woke DEI SJW snowflake game dev” is far from the only thing making games worse, it’s just what a lot of gamers can easily identify as a problem.

By the time I left, my last industry job had been reduced to what felt like manning the slop hose of mtx store items made by overseas outsource studios producing soulless trash under fuck-knows-what kind of nightmare working conditions.

We started seeing more diversity in games because devs are diverse and wanted to see themselves and their friends in their art.

The problem has never been queer or black characters in games. It is, and always has been, the prioritizing of profit over quality craft.

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6 points

I’d argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups don’t give a fuck about gaming or making good content.

The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem “hip” to the suits.

Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, don’t have a voice in the room.

I’m sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way you’d hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they don’t have a bully pulpit.

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-38 points
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The majority of complaints about wokeness in games is not that alternative lifestyles exist…

It’s that the game, story, or environment is being sacrificed to shove a political message down your throat.

What people complain about online doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is revenue. If the revenue isn’t enough then the discussion about wokeness dominates the discussion… I don’t think making bland/bad game “woke” in order to get more attention will save it. Controversy doesn’t sell that many games, might make more people aware of a product, but if they already didn’t like the product (or were just meh about it) - controversy wont move the needle in a positive direction.

Update: since I’m incapable expressing myself succinctly here. I refer everybody to this nutsa video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJS4JHYgj50 which is my basic position

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0 points

Controversy does sell games and can drive sales of bad games (GTA, Dark Souls, DND). People are more aware of it. They buy it and play it because “what’s the big deal”. They like it, despite its flaws, then they share it.

The complaints about “wokeness” are only created by bigots. Just because games have a queer or religious character doesn’t mean there’s an agenda to make more money. It’s just a trait that exists in the real world. And more than likely, the character takes traits from someone who made it, or someone they know.

Queer people exist. Being upset about a person existing in a game is a personal problem.

That being said, there are things I personally don’t like in games, so I just don’t play them.

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4 points

Wait, wait, what was the controversy with Dark Souls? Did I miss something there?

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5 points

He was likely using controversy on broad topics. For Dark Souls it would be difficulty and lack of an easy mode.

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14 points

The fact you consider people being gay, or black, or women political says a lot about what kind of person you are.

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-4 points

I did not say writing a good game about gay, black, or women is political.

It’s that the game, story, or environment is being sacrificed to shove a political message down your throat.

These statements are different.

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1 point

Honestly this sort of thing happening is extremely rare. In reality either the story/environment gets sacrificed to pander to some audience to make more money, or the game is from the ground up built to support that political message.

What also happens is devs deciding that they’d rather have diversity than trying to emulate some real historical setting in their unrealistic fantasy world, which for some reason gets people crying too, but has nothing to do with pushing a political message and rather just changing the expectation of white male default in western games (and probably pandering to the sensibilities of the majority of their audience to make more money).

It’s not wrong that the complaints about “woke” are mostly precisely about this perceived lowering of quality for some agenda or pandering, it’s just that that is rarely what’s happening. Like this whole idea that some people like to push that if not every woman in your game is conventionally attractive, it’s “woke” and you’re “ignoring your actual audience”. When usually these games have a ton of hot women (and men) anyway because they’re fully aware many people like playing hot characters, they just have other options too.

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8 points

If the writing sucks, the writing would still suck even if it was pro-oppression.

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22 points

So if the game is good and centers around those things its a good game.

But if its bad and centers around those things, its woke. Am i understanding you correctly?

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3 points

What exactly do you think needs to be sacrificed when deciding a character is gay?

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69 points

If the writing sucks, then talk about how the writing sucks. If I see someone crying “woke bs” without backing anything up I’m going to automatically assume that person is a bigoted moron.

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-33 points
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I think most people lack that level of self awareness.

I think if the most interesting thing about the game is how woke it is, thats a really bad sign.

Consider Cyberpunk 2077 as an example, there was a hot minute where people were getting their transphobic panties in a bunch over the hermaphroditic ingame advertisements, but There was so much MORE to talk about in cyberpunk 2077 that it wasn’t the only discussion about the game (even before it launched).

If I see someone crying “woke bs” without backing anything up I’m going to automatically assume that person is a bigoted moron.

If I see someone downvoting thoughtful comments I’m going to automatically assume that person is a closed minded moron.

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19 points

Lol.

If someone doesn’t like my unsubstantiated claim of “woke” they’re a moron

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9 points
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Your comments are not thoughtful. They’re the same dull BS that we’ve all heard hundreds of times before. Much like the creators of the “woke” games you’re decrying, you’re trying to write something interesting and simply failing. Perhaps you should empathize with them instead.

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39 points

As soon as someone calls something “woke”, I know immediately to ignore whatever they’re saying, they’re almost surely incapable of proper critical thinking. If they could form an actual critical opinion they’d be talking about that instead of using a generic political term that equates to “anything I don’t like or understand”.

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34 points

These outrage tourists call every “woke” if it fits their narrative.

Zelda: echoes of wisdom features Zelda as a playable character? Woke! Hades 2 having gay gods and Hephaistos being in a wheelchair? Woke! A game having the option to chose your pronouns in the character creator with no change in the actual story/narrative? Believe it or not: woke! /j

Disco Elysium is an actually very political and leftist game, but no one calls it “woke”, because it’s incredibly good and popular (also: these chodes probably wouldn’t even get the game).

Baldur’s Gate 3 has everything they complain about, but it’s not criticized, because it is loved by the community.

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18 points

I mean, people do call Disco Elysium “woke commie political garbage” because being a fascist in that game is paramount to self harm and they don’t like introspection.

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10 points

It’s probably the only time they’re right, when they call a game “commie”.

It’s still a phenomenal game and they can’t help but cope.

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12 points

It’s that the game, story, or environment is being sacrificed to shove a political message down your throat.

… said by people who only know of this because today we talk about that message. The same people who loved Starship Troopers without realising it’s a tale about the dangers of fascism. Who cheered Fight Club not realising it criticized male stereotypes. And lauded the Fallout video game series even though it on purpose allows same sex relationships since Fallout 2.

Sheep. Led by Russian propaganda filtered through their current favorite “I tell it like it is”-influencers.

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-5 points

said by people who only know of this because today we talk about that message

So what you’re saying is that those games didn’t shove their message down people’s throat while modern games do? That while they did have a political message, they didn’t make it core to the experience and presented it in a way that allowed people who only wanted to play to completely ignore it?

You are validating the above comment’s point.

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4 points
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Removed by mod
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1 point

“The majority of complaints about wokeness in games is not that alternative lifestyles exist…”

Could not disagree more. That’s exactly what the majority of complaints are about. Existence.

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10 points
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I’m just tired of being lectured in video games. Sorry if that makes me anti woke.

Spiderman 2, veilguard were both worse off because of poorly done DEI. BG3 was fantastic and created characters that weren’t talking about pronouns like I’m a 5 year old. Sorry not sorry.

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10 points
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3 points
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Deleted by creator
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10 points

A game that’s got well written characters representing minorities or which includes political theming and executes it well (e.g. Bioshock, Fallout 2 or Disco Elysium) is more woke than any other. That kind of game’s core concept is to make a strong point about structural injustice in society.

Games with token representation or the plot is thin but the main character is a woman so you’re sexist of you don’t buy it are generally not woke at all. They’re only pretending to be as a marketing strategy. They’re not doing anything to make anyone think about structural injustice in society, and are instead appealing to the common don’t be horrible to groups that it was normal to be horrible to decades ago that their market research team determined were already agreed with by most of their potential customers. It’s just capitalism noticing that mysogynists etc. are no longer the largest demographic and being very unsubtle when signalling that the product thinks women are people.

There are a small number of very vocal people who complain about both kinds of game. They don’t want people to acknowledge that treating women as people is now the default, but even more than that, they don’t want people to play Bioshock as then if they’re shown anything by Ayn Rand, they’ll be immediately able to spot the flawed logic on her philosophy. They’re careful to make sure to present it as if they’re only complaining about the virtue-signalling-as-marketing kind as everyone recognises that they’re generally crap, so it makes it look like they’re making a reasonable argument. It also means people amplify the argument, but by using phrases like woke instead of badly written it makes it easier to correctly label well-written games containing politics they disagree with as woke, too, and have people make the association with being badly written annoying slop by themselves, without having people who’ve played the game point out that it is well-written and someone saying otherwise is an idiot.

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0 points
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1 point

Hey buddy, turning every response into a recitation of the “List of Fallacies” poster you likely have up above your monitor doesn’t mean you’re “winning”. If you have an actual point to make, just make it and stop debating how people debate.

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1 point
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11 points

My position isn’t rooted in a denial of history but in the belief that games, music, and films are creative, self-contained domains to be enjoyed on their own merits—not as platforms for political messaging.

The issue here is that every time I see someone complaining that a game is “woke” is when suddenly there are gay people, or people of colour, or women not looking like a hooters waitress in the game. And the reality here is that this isn’t being woke, it’s that the game is being based on reality. Gay people exist, always have, so do people of colour, and women of all types and men too. The people that make it political are the people that don’t want to see the real world and the people in it.

Now, I don’t know what you feel is “woke” and I’m not saying this is directed at you, but just because there are people that don’t fit some preconceived mold, and they are included in a game, doesn’t make it magically political.

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-4 points
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4 points

Oh look, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.

I think you’ve been consuming too much Jordan Petersen.

That whole theory was rooted in anti-semitism and some weird mistrust that Jews were imposing culture on them. It’s the biggest load of baloney.

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5 points

A combination of: Marxian economics—specifically the framework of oppressor and oppressed—applied to social categories such as gender, race, and sexuality + Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School.

bro who is putting that in video games

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1 point

Marxian economics—specifically the framework of oppressor and oppressed—applied to social categories such as gender, race, and sexuality + Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School.

These have always been present in history, both in fact and fiction. Greeks vs Persians, Amazonians, China vs Western world (think Opium Wars and Boxer revolution), etc… These issues have always been there, this isn’t something new to the modern world and there are stories that have been around just as long with these same subjects.

This sudden overcompensation of swapping the gender, sexuality or race of characters in movies and games, under the guise of “celebrating diversity,” often feels less like a meaningful or thoughtful inclusion and more like a superficial, performative gesture. This trend is widespread and politically charged, driven not by genuine artistic intent but by a desire to align with current cultural trends.

Or it matches the more modern world. Today, more people can travel and move to different countries. More and more places have more and more people of different backgrounds, race, gender, sexuality that are in the public view. To not put these people in is to not understand today’s world and the people in it. Go outside and really look around, see how many people now don’t look like you, don’t dress like you and/or don’t act like you. Also, keep in mind where the games you are comparing them to are made, and understand what the developers see in their day to day life because that is more in line with what they’d know.

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26 points
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There’s nothing wrong with calling a bad game woke if they’re trying to cover their blatant flaws by tokenizing minorities and lgbt. See: Concord

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1 point

Starfield is another good example.

Some of you may have seen HeelVsBabyface’s infamous “pronouns” rant video and taken it a bit out of context. Many said he was upset at the sight of a pronouns selection option on the character creation menu. His rant actually came a few hours into playing after a series of quests with incredibly contrived dialogue.

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1 point

I really hate how too many games, and it’s games especially that do this feel the need to pretend that gender doesn’t exist.

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2 points

Don’t call it “Woke” though. Call it Faux Woke or Rainbow Capitalism. The term “Woke” carries specific baggage.

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1 point

Remember the Dead Rising Remake that removes the erotica category from photos, changes Larry from being asian to being a new yorker (Cause Asians can’t be evil, unlike White people!), and removing all reference to the Vietnam War (Because Communists can’t be evil?)

Yeah… Dead Rising kept getting worse with every entry, but damn the fact that they went back and made the first game seem shitty is an accomplishment (Especially since between the Wii Version and the Remake, they did that twice!)

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31 points

Picking a game that was already bad for 700 reasons doesn’t make the idiotic “woke = bad” label okay. The writing in a live service game was never going to be great.

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7 points

I think part of what has happened is a group of people has identified that a lot of modern writing is garbage, but doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong with it. The issue gets blamed on whatever seems like the most obvious change to them. There are some stories with better writing that have a diverse set of characters, and while there are still weirdos on the internet that complain about it, the general market response suggests people are most interested in good media, and good media can represent a diverse range of people.

As for my take on modern writing, I think “design by committee”, by means of publishers and marketing specialists grasping more control over the creative process is the major culprit in its declining quality.

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3 points

I realized this when I got into DBD and realized the game is in fact, very “woke”, and that it’s a core point of the game’s identity.

But it’s not a problem because it feels like a geniune effort by the Entity to capture a wide variety of survivors and killers from all walks of life, which translates into a lot of players able to look at the heroes and villains and go “Hey, s/he’s like me!”, which translates to putting in small things referencing sexualities and cultures to pander to those individuals.

The writing for all these characters are consistently good, except for when they aren’t (Looking at you Skull Merchant)

DBD IS a “Woke” game by every definition, but it isn’t shit and the story’s actually good because it’s clear the people making it give a shit about what they’re doing and the “woke” aspects simply come from exploring the ramifications of having the kind of cast it does.

I began to suspect it when people were bitching about how “Rey’s a giant Mary Sue!” in Star Wars

Because she isn’t. She actually LOSES most of the fights she’s in, can’t control her powers well for most of the films, and “How can she fly the Falcon so well!?!?!” was a common complaint even though she literally breaks the damn thing while doing so, meaning she can’t “fly it so well”, Rey as a character is clearly not the problem, but people latched onto her because she was something they could point to and say “HERE’S THE PROBLEM!”

So what WAS the problem with the sequels? The problem was they were so scared of doing something new with the Star Wars brand (Due to the fact that the prequels did something new and were lambasted for it) that they largely rehashed IV, V, and VI, without a plan for actually weaving one consistent story (Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker are great movies… that feel like they belong in separate trilogies)

And yeah… that and I will agree with the bashers in that making Luke’s Jedi Order fail and killing off all of his students off-screen without introducing any of them was basically Disney throwing money away.

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4 points

that’s horseshit. there is no such term for games that use sex to appeal to young boys to cover their blatant flaws.

plus that’s not why they’re doing it. two things can coexist without causing one another. that’s very disingenuous.

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